


Serbia (compare to chapter 10 in full version, also titled "Serbia")

by I_am_lampy



Series: The "It's All Fine" Collected Works Deluxe Edition [11]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence - The Reichenbach Fall, Forced Rape, Hurt Sherlock, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Major Character Injury, Mycroft Being a Good Brother, Post-Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Protective Mycroft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-19 09:02:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11310138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_am_lampy/pseuds/I_am_lampy
Summary: HEED THE TAGSIn this story, I have described physical torture, humiliation, and rape. I've tried not to go into too much detail except in one instance when a young soldier is forced to rape Sherlock. If this will be too hard for you to read, skip everything up until March 16, 2013 when Mycroft pulls him out of Serbia.





	Serbia (compare to chapter 10 in full version, also titled "Serbia")

* * *

**February 13, 2013**

**Donji Milanovac, Serbia**

Sherlock is in Serbia to wrap up the last of the human trafficking ring that Moriarty's people were responsible for. At this point, Sherlock's vision has narrowed to one thing. John. Every time Sherlock gets the shit beaten out of him, barely escapes getting shot, lives rough, goes a day without food – he pictures John sitting in his chair at the Baker Street flat drinking a cup of tea and waiting for Sherlock to come home.

As far as taking down the last of Moriarty's web, Sherlock has come full circle. His first mission as an unofficial representative of MI6 was to infiltrate the trafficking ring in New Orleans, where women from Serbia, Romania and the Czech Republic were taken in the expectation of receiving American citizenship in exchange for two years of unpaid labor. The women, of course, don't realize that the labor in question is prostitution.

Even though the FBI and MI6 have dismantled the hierarchy of the trafficking enterprise, they have yet to cut it off at the source. The people responsible on the European side, headquartered in Serbia, are looking for other buyers in Western Europe now that the American market is closed. This is Sherlock's last mission. The man at the top, the one responsible for the entire scam, is an important political figure, beloved by the armed forces of Serbia. Sherlock is so deeply undercover that not even Mycroft knows where he is. He knows where Sherlock is _supposed_ to be but has no timetable for when. Sherlock lost contact when he left Germany right before Christmas.

Sherlock is bone weary. He's been away from home for five hundred and thirty-six days and hasn't seen a friendly face in over six months. He misses London. He misses his flat and Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade and even Mycroft. Most of all, of course, he misses John. He carries John with him every second of those five hundred and thirty-six days. He doesn't remember what John's laugh sounds like anymore but he remembers the look on John's face when he tells Sherlock he's brilliant or when he watches Sherlock play the violin or staring Sherlock down when he's misbehaved.

While trying to gather information on the top man in the trafficking ring, Sherlock is found out. He's pegged as an assassin sent to take down this man, Zoran Brankovich. Sherlock runs. The army follows and the Serbian army isn't a slapdash affair like they were in the nineties. They have infrared devices, highly trained strike teams, including canine search teams with dogs that can follow a trail for days at a time.

Sherlock knows the choice is between dying or surrendering. He still values his life because he has a strong will to survive, to return to London and John. But he also values his life in part because he lives in fear that there's something he's missed, that Moriarty has one last trick up his sleeve even after death and that someone will get to John and make him pay for nothing more offensive than being Sherlock's friend.

So, Sherlock surrenders.

Sherlock is taken to a holding facility where he expects to be processed as a prisoner of the state, but instead, he's bundled into the back of a van and taken to a compound deep in the forest around a small-town close to the border of Romania. He knows this isn't good news because he's essentially been made to disappear. Now they can do anything to him.

Sherlock only has to hold out until Mycroft can manufacture an extraction, but Mycroft has two hurdles. The first, explain to the three people in the UK who can override Mycroft why his younger brother has been given resources to pursue a personal vendetta on a mission that has already been undertaken by MI6 and convince them to give Mycroft _more_ resources to get his brother out of Serbia.

Mycroft's second hurdle is pinpointing Sherlock's location.

Sherlock can expect to be here for months. He knows Mycroft will devote every second to finding him and getting him out of there. In the meantime, all Sherlock can do is endure. He puts his usual sarcasm and arrogance away. He makes himself as unthreatening as possible. The more cowed they think he is, the less fun they'll get out of hurting him.

The interrogations start immediately. They want to know why he's there to assassinate Brankovich. He's not, actually – that job belongs to someone else. Sherlock's job, as it has been on each mission, is intel gathering so the MI6 agents can go in and do their job. His interrogations start off with physical abuse that's relatively mild. Backhanded slaps, punches to the gut. He can survive the pain, but it's the daily indignations that wear him down. He's not allowed to bathe and the long hair he's dyed blonde is eventually covered in lice. He must use a bucket to relieve himself and he's only let out twice a week to empty it, which adds to the general malodour of his prison cell. They withhold food and when that doesn't work, they withhold water, and when _that_ doesn't work, they put him in a metal box so small he can't sit, can't stand up, can't lie down and so must crouch for hours at a time until his muscles are screaming in pain.

Sherlock's real hope is that he doesn't lose his usefulness as an informant because then they'll have no excuse to keep him alive so he doles out information as sparingly as he can. Then they bring in a guard named Danilo, a sadistic bastard, the kind always found in facilities like this. He's the kind of man who doesn't care about getting information out of Sherlock; he's only there to make Sherlock's life as horrific as possible. The other two – whose names Sherlock doesn't bother learning – will interrogate him occasionally, but their brutality is limited to a punch to the face here and there or locking him in the box. Danilo, though, likes to be able to _see_ Sherlock. The box isn't his style because it's a passive form of torture. No, Danilo is the one who likes to string Sherlock up and whip him with his belt, the belt buckle biting deep into his back. He's the one who has the depraved imagination, who comes up with ways to dehumanize Sherlock that go beyond a beating or withholding food.

On three occasions, Danilo makes Sherlock drink his own urine. There's the two days in a row he uses Sherlock as a human toilet. Being shit on is the worst. He isn't allowed a bath afterwards so he throws his clothes into the shit bucket and uses some of his drinking water to clean as much as he can so he doesn't die from _e. coli_ but doesn't risk dying from thirst either. After a few days, they take him into a courtyard and hose him down and then leave Sherlock there, naked, freezing in the Serbian winter.

These are the things that break Sherlock down. The beatings are a gift in comparison. This is how psychological torture works – you become grateful for the things that most people would contemplate with horror. At least when they're beating him, the pain gives him the opportunity to disconnect from his body. It's during these beatings that he has enough presence of mind to create a cupola at the top of his mind palace where he sits with John, who begins to take on the mythos of a god to Sherlock. The source of all good things is John. He is a deity. He is Sherlock's higher power.

Danilo is the one who sexually assaults Sherlock. Usually, he forces himself into Sherlock's mouth, but eventually he works himself up to anal rape, using spit as lubrication. The first time happens after Sherlock has been deprived of sleep for forty-eight hours and has started hallucinating. Moriarty is everywhere. He sees him stick the gun in his mouth and shoot himself but he doesn't die. He taunts Sherlock – _even with a hole in the back of my head, Sherly, I can still burn the heart out of you. I can make your pet dance_. He dozes off while being fucked. _This_ , he thinks later, _is what my life has been reduced to – I can take a nap while being raped_.

It's not the physical pain so much as the psychological pain of being violated, and that's the whole point. Rape isn't about sex. It's about power, which is why heterosexual men like Danilo can get an erection in order to rape a man. The second time Danilo rapes him, he doesn't even bother to use spit and he tears the skin around Sherlock's anus. The anal fissure is large enough that Sherlock's rule about not giving Danilo the satisfaction of vocalizing his pain goes out the window. He screams into his fist. Afterwards, he's in agony and there's no way to clean himself. He worries that having a bowel movement with an open wound will cause an abscess and that he'll die of sepsis.

Then two things happen back to back. The first thing is Zivko.

Zivko is the young guard who stands outside Sherlock's cell. Sherlock's not entirely sure why they need someone to guard it. It's not like Sherlock can pick the lock when there are dead bolts on the outside of the door. Even if he managed to get out of his cell, he's not strong enough to fight off both Zivko and the other guards stationed between him and freedom. It's most likely that Zivko's job is a sinecure and he's the son or nephew of someone prominent.

Sherlock discovers his name is Zivko because Danilo is constantly insulting him, calling him a _pussy_ because he's listens to music through his earbuds so he doesn't have to listen to Sherlock yell when he's being beaten. Zivko's heart is too soft, the hulking brute tells him. How will he ever become a man if he has the heart of a woman? A true Serb, he says, would enjoy hearing an enemy of the state being tortured. The sounds of his pain would be music to the ears of a true Serb, not the Western shit Zivko listens to. A Serbian soldier will do anything for his nation.

Sherlock sees the tears that shimmer on the edge of Zivko's lashes. He doesn't want to be here, Sherlock can tell. He always has dark circles under his eyes and his hands tremble slightly.

These guards are old enough to have been young men during the civil wars of the 1990s. They are old enough to have lost brothers, fathers, and friends to Croatia's brutal ethnic cleansings. They are old enough to have mothers, sisters, girlfriends, and friends who were raped and brutalized by Croat soldiers. These men have lived through the worst atrocities humans can effect upon another.

They have had to harden themselves so much that they have, in turn, become copies of the people who brutalized them.

Zivko, though, is just a boy. He wasn't here in the nineties. He doesn't seem older than sixteen to Sherlock. He's got the usual high cheekbones and almond shaped eyes of ethnic Serbs but his skin is pale. Sherlock can see Russian ancestry in Zivko's blushing cheeks and startlingly green eyes.

Zivko is constantly baited and mocked without mercy. Sherlock almost feels sorry for him. Eventually the taunts turn to Zivko's lack of sexual experience – what kind of Serb is Zivko if he's never had sex with a woman? How can he be a true son of Serbia if he's not man enough to tumble even a lowly barmaid?

Danilo comes up with a plan for Zivko to lose his virginity to Sherlock.

"Here," he tells Zivko in Serbo-Croatian. "We'll give this British man a bath and put some lipstick on him. Maybe we can find him a dress to wear and some knickers, too. We'll stuff his cock and balls up inside his knickers and all you have to do is fuck the hole."

The other two guards stationed in Sherlock's block of cells laugh and jeer. Sherlock can see the horror in Zivko's eyes but Sherlock's position doesn’t allow him to help anyone, including himself. At least they're giving him a bath, Sherlock thinks.

They allow Sherlock a bath and a razor. He has to put on a dress they've found for him somewhere. And, as they promised, Sherlock is required to put on red lipstick although he's spared the minor humiliation of having to wear women's underpants. Then they put him and Zivko in an interrogation room with a two-way mirror and lock them inside. Zivko looks terrified. The mic from behind the blacked-out glass is on and the guards start hissing and cat-calling. Zivko is trembling.

"Just get it over with and they'll leave you alone," Sherlock says impatiently.

"How am I supposed to get it up when I don't like boys?" Zivko spits. "I'm not a fag like you."

"Pretend I'm a girl," Sherlock says with a glare. "Nobody outside of here will know."

" _God_ will know!" he says indignantly. " _I_ will know!"

The guards heckle Zivko. "Take off your clothes!" they shout. "Get on with it!" Sherlock can hear the guards congratulating one another on this clever scheme. Danilo's hateful joke kills two birds with one stone. Humiliating Zivko means humiliating Sherlock.

Zivko looks at Sherlock, pleading. Sherlock beckons him closer.

"If I can help you get an erection, can you do this?"

Zivko shakes his head.

"For God's sake, you don't have the option not to do it!"

"Fine!" Zivko relents.

Sherlock tells him he will use his mouth to help Zivko get hard and bring him close enough to orgasm that when Zivko penetrates him, he won't have to do it for long. He tells Zivko to use lots of spit.

"Okay?" Sherlock asks.

Zivko nods and undoes his trousers. Sherlock drops to his knees and takes Zivko's flaccid penis in his mouth and in just a few minutes, Zivko is hard. When he starts to grab Sherlock's hair and his legs begin to shake, Sherlock pulls off. The lipstick that the guards made Sherlock wear looks like blood on Zivko's penis.

"Push me over the table roughly," he tells Zivko.

"Why?"

"Because if you're kind to me, they'll treat us both worse."

Once Zivko is inside him, it's over in less than a minute.

The guards congratulate Zivko, slapping him on the back and telling him he's a man now. The boy actually smiles at their congratulations, but Sherlock can see the look in Danilo's eyes calculating how best to use this against Zivko. Sherlock has probably just made things worse for Zivko.

Danilo ratchets up the psychological abuse of Zivko now that he has something concrete to use against the boy. They call Zivko every creative name for homosexual they can think of. They threaten to tell his mother. They ask him if he wants to have alone time with his _boyfriend_ , Sherlock. They'll set up a date for him and Sherlock, they say. Has Zivko gone to confession yet? Is Zivko going to help Sherlock escape so they can run away together?

Three weeks after Zivko is forced to rape Sherlock, he kills himself.

It turns out Sherlock was right about Zivko being related to someone important. He's Zoran Brankovich's son. Because of Zivko's suicide and the resultant furor, Mycroft is able to pinpoint Sherlock's location.

Because of Zivko's suicide, Sherlock is air-lifted out of the hell that is Serbia thirty-two days after being captured.

~*~

**March 16, 2013**

**Belgrade, Serbia**

The agents who pull Sherlock out of his restraints, where Danilo (now dead) was beating him with his belt, dislocate Sherlock's shoulder in their haste to get in and out again without causing an international incident. Once they're in the air, a medic stabs Sherlock with a morphine syrette and with the help of two agents, performs a closed reduction to pop the head of Sherlock's humerus back into place. He puts it in a sling and then does as much as he can to fix Sherlock up before they land.

Sherlock is already passed out from the pain of the reduction, though, and when he wakes up an hour or so later, he's bundled in blankets in the backseat of a car, slumped against the medic. The medic immediately sticks him with another bulb of morphine. Sherlock drifts off to the sound of the low voices of the agents in the car with him, and the rise and fall of the medic's chest as he breathes.

When he wakes up again, he's already been secreted inside the British embassy in Belgrade where he's immediately surrounded by a team of doctors and nurses. They insert a port IV in his neck, not even bothering going through his hand. They have to push antibiotics, a saline drip, an electrolyte solution, an antifungal and a corticosteroid into his body as quickly as possible.

Three nurses are tasked with the job of bathing him and treating the lice in his hair and pubic hair. They want to shave both, but Sherlock refuses to have his head shaved completely and, in the end, he's left with an inch of dark brown hair, only a few locks here and there tipped with blonde from dyeing his hair. The pubic hair he willingly gives up, though he knows he’ll regret it when it’s growing back because it'll itch like hell.

He's contracted a fungal infection on his skin from living in filth for four and a half weeks. The patches look like bed sores and some of them seep with fluid. They smear anti-fungal cream all over the sores and it burns. They draw vials and vials of blood. If being tortured didn't kill him, Sherlock's beginning to believe the goddamn nurses might. He's too weak and exhausted to complain much, though. Besides, he just wants to lie down between clean white sheets and sleep for about a week and then he wants to go home.

His back is a mess and he ends up needing sixty-three stitches. As he feared, he developed an abscess from the anal fissure the second time Danilo raped him. His back hurts too much to lie down on it so a nurse gets onto the exam table and holds him up as best he can while the doctor puts his calves into the metal stirrups . He drains the abscess, injects a local anesthetic and sews up the fissure. The doctor smears a combination of antibiotic ointment and topical anesthetic on the wound  and sticks a wad of gauze in between Sherlock's arse cheeks.

Thirty minutes later, Sherlock has three stitches, a prescription for a stool softener, and a list of instructions (to add to his growing list of instructions) on what he can and cannot eat so that his bowel movements won't irritate the wound.

They don't ask how he got an anal fissure that turned into an abscess, but they probably don't have to.

When he's been cleaned and stitched and stuffed with medications and solutions, a nurse pushes his IV trolley and walks him (very slowly) to a room where he'll stay before getting on a private plane and heading home. Mycroft is sitting on the bed wearing, of all things, a jumper and jeans. He hasn't shaved in a couple of days.

When he sees Sherlock, he covers his mouth with his hand and tears squeeze from his eyes. Mycroft keeps himself in check while the nurse helps Sherlock sit, as comfortably as possible, in a chair, with his IV trolley safely tucked next to him.

When she leaves, Mycroft bends over Sherlock, cradles his little brother's head in his hands, and kisses his temple while salty tears fall on Sherlock's cheek. For the first and probably last time in Sherlock's life, Mycroft says _I love you_. Sherlock buries his head in his older brother's chest and sobs. When his shuddering body has settled down to shivers, Mycroft sits in the other chair and tells Sherlock that he is never, ever again allowed to do anything more dangerous than chasing criminals around London.

Sherlock laughs weakly. There's a moment of silence and then Sherlock asks about John. Mycroft hesitates before picking up a brown folder on the table next to him and passing it over.

There's a picture of John sitting with six other people, sitting around a table outside of a pub. Five of them are laughing. The two that aren’t laughing are John and another man. Instead of laughing, they’re looking at each other, heads bent close together.

Sherlock, who can infer your job, your relationship, and what you ate for lunch just by looking at you, has no doubt what kind of relationship John has with this man.

“His boyfriend?” Sherlock asks Mycroft. Sherlock’s voice is hoarse, his larynx inflamed because of the screaming he did, both when Danila was beating him, and when the MI6 agent dislocated his shoulder (and then _again_ when they popped it back in.)

Mycroft nods. Sherlock can tell Mycroft is watching his face.

The photo captures a private moment, one that shouldn't have been caught on film by one of Mycroft's agents. One that _wouldn't_ have been captured on film except that Sherlock demanded security and surveillance for John when he and Mycroft were planning his fake suicide.

All of Sherlock’s physical pain disappears in the face of this one, gnawing wound. For a moment, he can’t catch his breath.

Sherlock takes a deep breath and reminds himself that he and John were never going to be a sure thing. Sherlock decided in New Orleans, all those months ago, that he would tell John how he felt, even if John couldn’t return his love. The boyfriend complicates things, but Sherlock isn’t going to go back on the vow he made to himself.

Sherlock flips the file closed and slides it onto the table. He stares at his shaking hands. It will be weeks before they stop shaking.

~*~

When the MI6 analysts come to debrief Sherlock the day after they arrive in Belgrade, Mycroft chases them away with what can only be described as threats of bodily harm and personal destruction. They scatter like cockroaches in the light and Sherlock can't help but laugh. It's the first time he's laughed in months.

~*~

When he wakes the next day, the debriefing begins. Sherlock wants to get it over with in one day, but Mycroft puts a halt to the questioning after three hours. He makes Sherlock eat one of the bland foods allowed on his diet, and then tells him to take a nap. When Sherlock refuses, Mycroft threatens to have something put in his IV to make him sleep so Sherlock lies down carefully on his side and closes his eyes. To his surprise, he sleeps.

When he wakes, Mycroft makes him eat again and then he allows the agents back in for another three hours. Despite the fact that Mycroft's mollycoddling drags the process out longer than he wants it to, Sherlock is grateful. Usually, by the end of the three-hour sessions, he's having a hard time answering questions. His body is so exhausted and his mind isn't much better.

Eventually, it's done and Sherlock can finally go home.

~*~

**March 21, 2013**

On his fifth day in Belgrade, a nurse helps Sherlock into a pair of fleece bottoms and long sleeve t-shirt provided by Mycroft then hands him a warm coat (not his beloved Belstaff – that's waiting at home), thick socks and trainers. Sherlock meets Mycroft outside his room and they walk – slowly due to Sherlock's injuries – to a car that takes them to a private airfield where they board a small private jet.

Four hours later he lands in London.

**Author's Note:**

> This is what it means to have beta readers. I've taken this verbatim out of an email conversation.  
>  **Jenn:** _make this statement more generic if you are not going into detail on that part of the story. Such as "hasn't seen a friendly face in over six months"_  
>  **Teddy:** _can you change it for me? Because I'm lazy?_  
>  I. Am. So. Spoiled.


End file.
